By Joe Yonan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, December 20, 2006; F01
Listeners of NPR's "Weekend Edition Sunday" know the voice well: For three years, Bonny Wolf has been regaling them with monthly essays about food and the ways it connects us to our families, friends, even ancestors we never knew. In her new book, "Talking With My Mouth Full: Crab Cakes, Bundt Cakes, and Other Kitchen Stories" (St. Martin's Press, November 2006), Wolf digs with gusto into topics such as Jell-O, real Texas chili, state fair meat-on-a-stick, the glories of popovers and the biological impulses behind comfort food.
Wolf, 56, grew up in Minnesota and has been a newspaper and magazine reporter and editor in New Jersey, Texas and Washington. She taught journalism at Texas A&M University and was chief speechwriter for two U.S. secretaries of agriculture. Besides delivering her radio essays, she is contributing editor of NPR's weekly online food column, "Kitchen Window."
She has lived on Capitol Hill with her husband, Michael, for 22 years. I interviewed her last week in front of an audience at the Borders on L Street NW. Excerpts from our conversation follows:
What's your earliest food memory?
You know, all my memories are connected to food, starting with my birthday cake when I was 5. My mother made this many-tiered cake with a doll in the top of it so it looked like Scarlett O'Hara with a giant skirt. I remember my wedding by the food; the birth of my son by what my mother cooked.
Did your mother make that cake every year?
She never made anything more than once. I'm like that. I try things when people come to dinner, and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. I have a chapter called "Dinner Disasters," which included the time I roasted a whole chicken in driveway salt. I also have a fire section, because I have caught my hair on fire, every potholder I own.
What were your first food experiences in my home state of Texas?
Chicken-fried steak.
Chicken-fried steak is the very first thing I learned how to make.
I understand I may not have had good chicken-fried steak, because I know people like it. It's sort of like Wiener schnitzel, isn't it? There are a lot of German influences in Texas.
When I was in college in Austin, some places sold "chicken-fried chicken," which is not fried chicken, but chicken that's fried in the manner of chicken-fried steak, believe it or not.
My perception is that there was a holy trinity of food: chicken-fried steak, barbecue and chili. I have grown to both love and make real chili and barbecue.
One of my favorite threads is the idea of nostalgic recipes, like your antipasto story.
My mother used to serve something with cocktails that she called antipasto, so when I came East my husband ordered antipasto at a restaurant; this big platter of cheeses and meats came out, and I laughed and said, "No, no, this is not antipasto." I explained to him that, of course, it comes in a jar.
You were so sure of yourself.
Of course. My mother had gotten the recipe for this from my great aunt, who had had an arranged marriage to a fireman on the Minnesota fire range, where people from all over the world had come to work in the iron mines. Her next-door neighbor was Sicilian and made this antipasto. Much later I went to Oregon and saw on a menu "Sicilian Antipasto," and my husband said, "Let's order it and see if it's like Aunt Esther's." So we ordered it, and it was. So I called the chef out, and he had grown up in a California mining town where there were Sicilians. We follow this thing all over the country, and finally I'm in Costco, and there's my Aunt Esther's antipasto!
In a huge, giant jar, probably.
It was from a place in Canada. They had made it in a delicatessen, and it had become so popular they got rid of the deli and just made this antipasto.
You spend a chapter on the District's own Eastern Market. Did you go there as soon as you moved to Capitol Hill?
Absolutely. We moved here from College Station, Texas, and I took one look at the market and said, "Well, we'll just be living here forever." If the kitchen is the heart of the home, this market is the heart of the community. I go every day. Sometimes I just go for a lemon.
One of my favorite chapters was about the Minnesota State Fair.
The Texas State Fair is the biggest, but the Minnesota State Fair is the best, and the second biggest. Everything is served on a stick. And every year they have something new. A couple years ago they had a Reuben sandwich on a stick. The pork chop is on a stick. They call it hog on a log. I like the food on a stick, but I love the agricultural buildings, the apple pavilion, the honey. The guy's there with the bees; they have honey ice cream. The hogs are unbelievable. It all reminds us that the food comes from the ground and the farm.
The image that stuck with me was of the beauty queen.
Every year all the dairy farmers nominate princesses, and one princess becomes Princess Kay of the Milky Way. She goes and sits in a big cooler that turns. It's inside some kind of clear acrylic.
Like a big snow globe.
She's sitting in there in a parka, with her crown on, while somebody sculpts her head in butter. This is the butter head. They give it to her. It's like 90 pounds of butter. Some of them use it for Christmas cookies.
I want to ask you about comfort foods. You write that there are reasons for what we find comforting.
There are physiological connections between eating fatty or high-calorie foods and comfort. Chicken a la king is my comfort food. When my son was born, my mother came to visit, and I asked her to make it every night for three weeks. But my younger friends tell me comfort food is the same as hangover food: anything fried, anything greasy.
When you're hung over, you need comfort.
Exactly. I think eating is a communal act, and it's comforting. After Sept. 11, for an entire week a group of us in my neighborhood -- we live eight blocks from the Capitol, and it was a very uncertain time -- for a week we got together for dinner. Nobody discussed it. Somebody brought a rotisserie chicken, someone had lettuce in the crisper. We wanted to be together, and we wanted to be together over a meal.